England's greatest and the wife he 'killed'

Authorised biographies tend to be over-tactful and play down any suggestion of unworthy behaviour by their subject. Not this one.

At times, it is damagingly candid. At times, it almost makes you shudder. It is an awesome achievement.

V. S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia — winner of just about every prize including the Nobel — is often claimed to be the best writer in English of recent times. But he is probably more widely celebrated for giving offence all round.

Like a sample? 'England is such a boring place one can do nothing else but work ... in England people are very proud of being very stupid.' 'In the Fourth Form I wrote a vow to leave [Trinidad] within five years. It took me six ... Indians are such consummate hypocrites, preaching goodness and austerity while indulging in the grossest materialism.' That should take care of the man's three homelands. That is Naipaul for you, always denouncing something, though not when asked who is the best English writer: 'I am, of course.' So it is worth noting that he allowed the same outspokenness about himself in the interviews he gave Patrick French. .

Naipaul asked for no changes to this resulting biography, which is almost equally revealing and tantalising because of the complexity of the character it explores. Wisely, French leaves the judging of it to the reader. There is no easy verdict to reach.

It is already 50 years since Naipaul burst into view with those quaint and delightful chronicles of Trinidad life, Miguel Street and The Mystic Masseur, to which local dialect added such refreshing zip.

Let us slip, for the fun of it, into the idiom of Ganesh, the masseur and lover of 'litricher': 'Look, man, how much book it have by Naipaul sahib. Day and night he writing novel and thing. Is all he good for.

Every time you turn round — bam — another book done print.' But although most critics loved him from the start, it was an inse- cure, hard-up, fearful start that he made, earning only £300 in five years for the first three novels.

He was a triple outsider. He was an East Indian-West Indian, writing for an English audience, in a hybrid brand of English.

Vidia Naipaul felt a desperate need to succeed. His father, a frustrated writer, pinned his hopes on his son but died as Naipaul left Oxford. 'I should have gone back.

My family was in distress, but without having become a writer I couldn't go back.' That panic, the fear of failing to be what he should be, drove him to a breakdown. He made himself a writer by an act of will, considerably helped by the girl he had met at Oxford, Pat Hale, who became his reader, typist and encouraging critic. Her father could not stand the idea of his daughter marrying an Indian, while from home his father wrote: 'No one is happy at your marrying any but an Indian.' This was the Fifties. But they married and she taught in a school to support them, while he joined a BBC overseas radio programme called Caribbean Voices. One afternoon in the freelancers' room he put BBC paper into the typewriter and Miguel Street began to appear.

Naipaul had muscled his barque into the stream — A House For Mr Biswas was waiting to be written.

Soon Evelyn Waugh was writing to Nancy Mitford: 'That clever little nigger Naipaul has won another prize. Oh, for a black face.' That deals with usually the most interesting part of a writer's story.

Success is a boring subject. But Naipaul's years of slowly growing fame were disturbed by sexual melodrama.

In Buenos Aires he met Margarita, a bored wife and mother, and what had been his unexciting sex life with Pat (alleviated by visiting prostitutes) took fire. 'I was passionately looking for sensual fulfilment and when it came it was wonderful.' He told each of them about the other.

Margarita fulfilled his fantasy with her addiction to violent, even cruel sex. This gave him new power as a writer.

For the next 20 years and more he bounced like a ping-pong ball between the two women. He needed both — one for bodily, the other for writerly needs.

The last act was tragic. Pat was in remission from breast cancer when she read an interview in which he calmly admitted to having been 'a great frequenter of prostitutes' when young.

This revelation upset her greatly and soon afterwards the cancer returned.

'She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way,' he told his biographer.

During her dying months, he was travelling in Pakistan — nothing could stop his book schedule — and he met an extrovert journalist, Nadira, 24 years his junior, to whom he said before leaving: 'Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?' He went home to their Wiltshire cottage to grieve at his wife's bedside, but the day after her death Nadira arrived. They were married two months later to the amazement of his friends. Margarita was left to read about it in the papers.

The book ends with the emotionally taxing scene of the journey the newlywed couple made to scatter Pat's ashes. The second wife scatters the contents of the first wife's urn. V. S. Naipaul remains at the car, weeping. As he himself wrote: 'The world is what it is.'